Saturday, January 16, 2010

Gist of the Sixties

Reality fans, here is an brief essay by John Perry Barlow that expresses the gist of the 60s better than anything I could ever hope to write:

LSD is a drug that produces fear in people who don’t take it. --Timothy Leary

It’s now almost half a century since that day in September 1961 when a mysterious fellow named Michael Hollingshead made an appointment to meet Professor Timothy Leary over lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. When they met in the foyer, Hollingshead was carrying with him a quart jar of sugar paste into which he had infused a gram of Sandoz LSD. He had smeared this goo all over his own increasingly abstract consciousness and it still contained, by his own reckoning, 4,975 strong (200 mcg) doses of LSD. The mouth of that jar became perhaps the most significant of the fumaroles from which the ‘60s blew forth.

Much much more at Reality Sandwich.

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